An alternately entertaining and sobering look at the sport and big business of auto racing.
The NASCAR legend looks back on his life on the racetrack.
“From the highest highs to the lowest lows, no one has lived the NASCAR life quite the way I have.” So writes Petty, now 62, old enough to have grown up in a time when muscle cars were made not just of Malibus and Barracudas, but also Monte Carlos and even Buicks. The conventional wisdom, he writes, is that NASCAR grew out of jocular contests between bootleggers after outrunning the revenuers. In fact, the races began as a pastime by soldiers who, having returned from the battlefronts of World War II, didn’t have much else in the way of entertainment in the South. Petty’s grandfather was one such racer, as was his father, and Petty’s son—who was killed on the track in 2000, when he was only 19—extended the racing tradition to make the Pettys the only known four-generation sports dynasty in history. Writing with the assistance of Henican, Petty is a capable storyteller who’s comfortable on and off the track, and if some of his racing reminiscences are geared toward the motorhead set, he records plenty of human-interest yarns—not least his affecting writing about his son’s death. One interesting anecdote concerns Petty’s relatively brief tenure as a country singer, summoned by Hank Williams Jr. to reflect on the long shadows their famous fathers cast. Another recalls his struggle to find an appropriate memorial to his son in the form of a camp for underprivileged kids, one that came into being with the benevolent support of racer and track fan Paul Newman. Just as vivid are the author’s accounts of the many mishaps a track driver is bound to suffer in the pursuit of a decidedly dangerous sport. Recalling a crash, he writes, “That didn’t look normal. It was a bone sticking out of my left thigh. A big bone. A very big bone.”
An alternately entertaining and sobering look at the sport and big business of auto racing.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27781-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.
A great American character claims her double legacy of genius and addiction.
Calling herself “the original nepo-baby,” the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli offers a raw and revealing look at a life shaped by fame and personal struggle. At the heart of Minnelli’s story is her fraught relationship with her volatile mother. While stressing that “our love was what mattered,” life with Judy was no picnic. The night before her fifth birthday, she accidentally kicked her mother in the head while watching TV, permanently scarred by lesson that “if Mama got angry, she was the most terrifying person in my life.” Garland’s addictions made her unstable and unreliable, forcing her daughter to take on adult responsibilities at a very young age. A veteran performer by the time she was in double digits, she won the first star in her EGOT crown (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards) at age 19 for her role in the musical Flora the Red Menace. This was also her first work with John Kander and Fred Ebb, musical collaborators in her most iconic successes: Cabaret, Liza With a “Z,” and New York, New York. Minnelli describes taking her first Valium in 1969 at the time of her mother’s death from an overdose, unwittingly assuming the mantle of addictions that would mar her public and private life for decades. In and out of the Betty Ford Center, she finally achieved sobriety in 2015, on the eve of her 70th birthday. As the title suggests, she has great stories, and, with the help of her dear friend Feinstein and co-writers Getlin and Evans, she leaves out none of the juice. From her torrid, cocaine-fueled romance with Martin Scorsese (both were married at the time, and she cheated on both husband and lover with Mikhail Baryshnikov) to her falling-out with Lady Gaga at the Oscars in 2022, she spares neither herself nor anyone else and, in the process, reclaims her once very tattered dignity in a moving and remarkable way.
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781538773666
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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